Winnie Kay (capissen38) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-29 17:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, kaylee |
Who: Thomas Bat and Winnie
What: The Bat does not do well with vengeful teenagers
Where: Capissen 38
When: At the tail end of Deadpool's attack of conscience
Warnings: None
The Bat had not been far away, watching the purple day slowly cool, then freeze, then disappear. He had been thinking about a great many things, but most of all how to prevent this from happening ever again. He came up with no answers, only more questions and a few more things he could have done to prevent this time, this death.
When he heard the gunshots, however, gunshots echoing away from his eventual destination at the gas station with the odd name, he stopped thinking about then and started thinking about now. What he should have been doing. Moving at a run, he dropped down one of his lines three stories, shoved off a brick wall that crumbled under his gloves, caught himself on yet another open window (rattling the flower pots) and then landed with an easy, weight-distributing roll on the alley six stories down from his original position.
In the gray twilight he was probably not the most reassuring sight as he came around the corner of the Bentley, dragging shadows and looking like death coming to call. “Miss Kay?”
Winnie was leaning against the work table when she heard the footfalls. The combination of grief and fear and panic kept her frozen, and she closed her hand around a wrench and spun around to face whoever was there, her eyes red-rimmed and wild. She held the heavy tool in a shaking grip, and her cheeks were a bright red. She brandished the wrench like a weapon, and she looked as terrified as she felt, and just as likely to strike as a frightened animal, hurting and desperate. She didn't register that this was the Bat everyone talked about, that he wasn't there to hurt her. No, she just registered another threat, another threat, another threat. She looked young, all red-haired innocence and shattered naivete. “You better hope you got a reason to be here that don’t have to do with shooting at me,” she told him, glancing over her shoulder to where Deadpool had just been and giving away the fact that she had absolutely no fighting experience - as if that needed to be revealed.
He was relieved to see her standing there waving a wrench at him. It meant she was alive to do so, and he was so much caught up in this second near-mistake that it was audible in his voice. “I was coming to speak with you--I heard the shots.” Nothing could induce him to show her his back while she was armed and threatening, but he still came a step closer and scanned the garage’s contents. The mask was not designed to look kindly to some and not to others; it showed ominous crescents under the shadow of the brow that was only the whites of his eyes moving, and as the cape followed him in his whole form seemed to stretch and thin with confusing fluidity.
She backed up.
In many ways, he looked more frightening than the man in red, the man who had not killed her. She kept the wrench outstretched, as if he couldn’t grab her wrist at any moment and wrest it from between her fingers. “You’re one of them, one of Jack’s friends,” she said. She knew he wasn’t Rory, and she knew it based on the suit alone - no one who lived in Hamartia could afford that. She looked over her shoulder once more, paranoid that the man would return. It made her think, and she turned to look at him, the Bat in the middle of her garage. “What’d he look like?” she demanded. “The man what killed him. He was really dressed in red like the papers said?”
“He was here?” the Bat questioned, without answering any of the questions. He did not pursue her retreat, knowing she needed the security of distance and finding it did not cost him to give it to her. She wasn’t injured, he saw, and he was further relieved, so much so that he set his shoulders back and, for once, did not think of pursuing. The red-suited man’s time would come; the Bat was sure.
“What did he look like?” she asked with a stubborn tilt of her chin that was incongruous in someone who looked as young as she did. She wasn’t answering his questions, not if he didn’t answer hers.
The Bat caught on. “Yes, he was in red.” He stayed still, but his horned head turned to examine the horizon, looking for sight lines. “He was there?” He pointed at his best guess, considering where he had found her and where she had been facing.
She lowered the wrench, and she nodded. “But he could have killed me easy, and he didn’t. He pulled up short and hit the wall instead, real intentional,” she said, the wrench falling from fingers to concrete with absolutely no reaction from her. “He let me see him too. He wasn’t thinking on hiding,” she added, and her voice was taking on a sort of shock still that was eerie. “Where’s Jack’s body?”
The Bat frowned. It was visible, if you looked hard. Again, he did not answer her question, moving around the Bentley down the sight line he had indicated, looking for a sign of impact. From that distance it would need to be a rifle--he had a guess as to the caliber, and if he was right there would be solid evidence. Something told him the red-suited man hadn’t had time to pick up his shell casing either. All these things were more reassuring than Winnie Kay’s certainty that he had not meant to kill her, however. Even professionals made mistakes. But why Kay? For money? It wouldn’t be necessary to pay such an expensive professional to kill a gas station attendant. It was not the same as breaking into an assemblage of trained fighters. Thinking, he ran the intentionally thin pads on his gloves that were positioned over his fingertips against the surface of the wall.
“You’re real terrible at answering questions,” she said, forcing herself to brave the distance between them. She stopped just shy of him, and she watched the movement of his fingers on the wall. “Why’d he miss?” she asked, because that was the mystery, wasn’t it? “I’m guessing he shot because of Jack somehow, but why’d he miss?” she asked, panic rising in her voice and in the question. “Do you think he’s coming back?” she asked immediately after, rapid-fire and need to know now. “If he’s coming back, I gotta get out of here,” she said, that realization finally dawning on her. “Do you think he knows who Jack’s friendly with? Is he going after everyone?” Panic, rising with each question.
“I don’t know the answer to any of those questions,” he said, realizing he was not being reassuring in the slightest but unable to lie to her directly. “I can tell you that this man is a professional and... I find it difficult to believe he missed on accident. It is not a long shot.” No, not reassuring at all. He found a pockmark in the wall much lower than he expected, but that was always the case with bullets: they were never where you expected them to be. He opened one of the little compartments on his belt and found a pair of industrial strength tweezers and started working at the bullet with care. “As far as I can tell, Jack was not friendly with very many people. Your overhasty public commentary on the forum made your association clear, but his other friends are more cautious.”
"He didn't miss on accident," Winnie said, as if it was so obvious it didn't need telling. "This ain't a big place, and I wasn't a moving target," she said. She was shaking with the admission, however certain she sounded in the response itself, and this man wasn't helping a damn bit with that. She longed for Cherrie, with her warm arms and loving demeanor, or her mother, with her chipper chatter and teasing consolations, or even her daddy, with his gruff and awkward hugs and gruff sounds of reassurance. She didn't have any of those things; she had a cold man in a black suit, and the tears started running down her cheeks the longer he spoke. She watched the bullet retrieval with a cold sense of fear (that bullet could have been in instead of the wall), and she backed away from his comment about Jack being friendless. "People shouldn't have to be cautious," she said, with all the petulance of a teenager who was just learning that life wasn't always fair. "Not when someone important's gone forever." Her lip trembled and she tipped her chin upward again. "Grieving don't come with thinking and being all cold."
“No, they shouldn’t.” His body concealed the great majority of what he was doing, but he secured the evidence, as always, took a handful of digital pictures with a camera the size of a credit card, and then he stood up. He gave her a long look that no doubt looked entirely unsympathetic. “But they do.” He came around the open hood noiselessly, as if gliding inches from the ground, and cast a short look at the engine, and then back at her. “Can you think of anyone that would do this to Jack? Something personal, perhaps.”
The look felt as unsympathetic as it appeared, and her shoulders sagged in defeat. She registered his perusal of the engine and the way he glided, but in a way that was removed from everything else, unimportant in a moment comprised entirely of her own pain and anguish and anger. She shook her head when he asked if she knew anyone that would do this, and she looked at him with eyes that watered, even though she was almost entirely out of tears. "He didn't know anything specific neither, or he would have left it in the note he left for me, the one in case something like this happened," she said.
She looked back at the window. "I took a hit out on him," she said with a childish sort of pride. "Maybe he found out, though I ain't paid for it yet, so I don't think nothing's happened."
“You what?” His demeanor changed, and perhaps his expression of sympathy had not been obvious, but he certainly had not been forwardly threatening. Everything about him straightened and seemed to enlarge, while at the same time tense and dangerous. “On whom?”
Her response to what she considered an intimidation tactic was too stand up taller too, to puff herself up, all red hair and eyes and cheeks, neck flushing brightly with a growing sense of anger. "On whoever killed him, whoever killed Jack. I gave them the description, and they said they'd do it for a price. If y'all can't do it, you heroes, I'm gonna find someone who will. Jack deserves that, to be avenged. It's only right." Her voice broke, something sharp and glass-like in the sound of shattered innocence and dreams and slippery slopes. "He can't just get away with what he's done, don't you see?"
The man beneath the mask was strongly reminded of very small birds trying to intimidate with an excess of fluff and bluster. It didn't make him less angry, but it made him take a different approach. "He won't. But this isn't the way. Think about the description you gave. What if that fits someone else? Who is the devil you're dealing with? Do you really want to be responsible for the death of someone else?" His voice didn't change tone, but he was careful with the sentence, and slowed it down. Not as if he was talking to a child--just as if he wanted to be absolutely sure of what he was saying. "What if that someone else has someone like you, someone who will be afraid and hiding and sad that they're gone?"
"You can't mistake a man in a red face mask with two guns. Cipher's description in the Creation Times was plain as day. All I did was put some value behind taking him out," she told him, just a little of the bluster fading at the fact that he didn't argue with her in return. "You want him dead just as bad," she said added, accusatory. "So don't be saying you ain't or pretending you're interested in him living out his days. And I'm not scared." The last part was a lie, but she said it anyway; she wasn't going to admit to being so terrified that she couldn't quit shaking from it, not to him.
"Every life affects others. When you kill, you assume that there is no good that comes from that life, and you can't assume that. There are many people who know Jack as a murderer, and he left widows and fatherless children and friends like you. Death affects everyone. You want other people to feel what you're feeling?" He sounded low, disappointed in her, in everyone around him. "Vengeance isn't the answer," he said to himself. "Vengeance doesn't stop."
Winnie was too hurt, too angry to listen to his wisdom. In the way of children who learn all at once that they aren’t immortal, that they can’t run away from certain things, she was selfishly angry, and she wanted the man who hurt Jack, the man who hurt her by hurting Jack to pay the ultimate price. She wasn’t focused enough or old enough to realize there were things worse than death, and so it was the worst thing she could imagine - not being anymore. “It ain’t your answer, but it is mine,” she said with the heartlessness that can come only from the very young. “He’s gonna hurt, and I’ll like knowing it.”
“If you are responsible for a death, you’re no better or worse than whoever killed Jack. If anyone dies because of you, then I’ll come back.” The threat was delivered without movement, without a change, as fact, and undoubtedly as heartless as her argument a moment ago. “I am here for justice, not to make you feel better about what you want.” He turned away. Philosophy was not something that could be explained, he thought. It had to be lived.
“If you’re gonna threaten me, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave,” she said, voice shaking and chin defiant again, even if he’d already turned, dismissing her; she would have the last word. Truth be told, he terrified her in that suit, and she was glad to see the back of him, even if it left her with the memory of the man in red and the open window at her back.